The next front in the pandemic culture wars: Vaccine passports
By Molly Roberts,
The first thing to know about vaccine passports is that they’re not passports. They’re more like certificates, likely emerging in the form of scannable smartphone codes, that declare one thing and only one thing about their bearer: that they have gotten stuck in the arm the requisite number of times.
The second thing to know about vaccine passports is that they don’t even exist yet, at least not at any appreciable scale. The White House is working with private companies to develop standards for whatever products emerge, but the government isn’t crafting a little blue book with an N95-clad eagle embossed in gold that all civilians must carry wherever they go.
Vaccine passports have little to do with international travel (that’s another conversation) and more to do with everyday life right here where we already are: in our bars, ballparks and other businesses that want to open their doors wide again without risking outbreaks. The Post reported on Sunday that 17 initiatives for covid credentials are in the works. This suggests the problem is less likely to be centralized surveillance of the citizenry and more likely to be a shambolic hodgepodge of protocols too confusing for businesses to enforce.
The next thing to know about vaccine passports is they’re about to start a war anyway.
All the usual marks of cultural crusading have already appeared: the claims about constitutionality puffed full of confidence but empty of context, the accusations of hypocrisy that are themselves hypocritical, the comparisons that defy critical thought.
[
Full coverage of the coronavirus pandemic
]
“Let me get this straight,” tweeted Donald Trump Jr. “Some Democrats want American citizens to have a Vaccine Passport to travel freely within the United States but not an ID to vote?!? Clowns!!!” Three clown emojis followed for emphasis.
Democrats ask the same question but in reverse. Republicans turn hysterical over people carrying a card to the grocery store to stymie a deadly disease, but they insist on people carrying a card to the polling place to prevent systemic fraud that hasn’t been proven to exist?
Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.), meanwhile, reached into his lib-trolling grab-bag to pull out two pieces of historical hyperbole: The passport proposals “smack of 1940s Nazi Germany.” And President Biden “shares more commonalities with Leninism than liberalism.”
The liberals-not-Leninists shoot back again, exaggerating the utility of a concept that doesn’t yet have much proof. These passports won’t infringe on privacy, and they won’t prove coercive, their argument goes. They will deliver us all from this plague.
The reality, as usual, is somewhere in between.
These non-passport passports won’t emerge as a mandate from the Oval Office or Congress, and the biggest of Big Government won’t be tracking our individual vaccination status, what we’ve done with our newfound immunity or where we’ve done it. Mostly, private companies will want to know whether we’re jabbed so that they can finally make as much money as they used to with as little hazard as that used to involve.
But public health guidelines permitting large indoor gatherings only among the inoculated will inform some of those private companies’ decisions, and creating scannable codes such as those New York just started piloting will require some verification against state records. (The concerns about equity, too, are real, as long as disenfranchised people get fewer shots and own fewer smartphones.)
Similarly, signing up will be a choice — but when everything fun in the world is conditioned on that sign-up, the concept of choice turns fuzzy. This is coercion. Yet coercion may be exactly what the doctor ordered for those hesitant to face the needle but desperate to dance at a wedding.
None of us know yet where, when and to whom we might be required to present this handy-dandy credential, so people instead invent the scenarios that either most enrage or most soothe them. Maybe we’re barred from anywhere and everywhere, unable even to step into the grocery store for tomorrow’s breakfast. Or maybe we’re only turned back from the punk show where we had hoped to throw ourselves against thousands of strangers.
Vaccine passports are the new masks. Depending on where you are, what you read and how you vote, they are either the badge of the oppressor or the brand borne by the righteous. They will either solve everything or nothing. They are the new lockdown and the new quarantine: both terms we continue to use for our current condition even though most of us are only semi-isolated and fully free to romp where we please. No one cares about the in-between. We want extremes, and where there aren’t any we create them.
Vaccine passports don’t even exist yet, but that won’t stop our riven country from turning them into exactly what we’re always looking for: a reason to get mad at the other guy.
Twitter: @mollylroberts
Read more: Paul Waldman: Don’t believe conservative fearmongering over vaccine passports Aaron Schwid and Tom Frieden: How to reopen the economy safely? Immunity passports. Govind Persad and Ezekiel J. Emanuel: What are the ethics behind covid-19 ‘immunity passports’? The Post’s View: Welcome to the new normal. Let’s see your immunity passport. Michele L. Norris: Thanks to covid-19, the age of biometric surveillance is here
